ARLIS/NA 43rd Annual Conference

Sponsored by Gale Cengage Learning

Speakers:

Reading Requires Seeing: Teaching Computers to See Texts — Neal Audenaert, Assistant Research Engineer, Texas Center for Applied Technology, Texas A&M University

Applying the Lens to the Visual: Finding One’s Way into Large Data Sets — Peg Knight, Senior Product Manager, The Arts, ProQuest

#arthistory: Mining Social Media to Historicize the Contemporary — Spencer Keralis, Research Associate Professor, University of North Texas

Supporting the Big and the Boutique: Visualizing Digital Humanities and Digitizing Visual Culture — Liz Grumbach, Project Manager, ARC and 18th Connect, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A&M University

Moderator:
Sarah Falls, ‎Head of the Fine Arts Library, Ohio State University

Digital Humanities is a collective term that describes a new means of conducting research and presenting scholarly output throughout all fields in the Humanities. Currently in its infancy, DH initiatives on campuses and art research centers take many different forms, often anchored by local champions or collections and flavored by institutional cultures and the research needs of those whom the initiatives support. Beliefs persist that the arts languish somewhere behind the curve of mainstream academia in embracing new means of discovery that are conversely reliant on visual media. This panel will prove that for arts research methodologies, careful movement forward and consideration are needed to further disciplines.

At the crux of arts-based research methodologies is the study of the image. At the basis of art historical research is the comparison of images and tracing of progression of styles. Large textual data sets provide researchers valuable archival and research information, but digital image sets and the apparatus to study them visually are also needed to help the discipline progress forward to new research paradigms. As librarians, how do we help with that progression? How does the work take place to help our users define sets of images for study and relate them to textual data? Are there tools for image analysis and for managing large research sets? How can existing image metadata be used in the context of the Digital Humanities and in supporting our researchers?

Work continues at Texas A&M University to design tools that help scholars explore, analyze, and understand visually constructed meaning in document images in large-scale collections. Neal Audenaert will present an overview of this current work with an emphasis on the University's collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center's Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis.

As interest in Digital Humanities swells and researchers innovate around examining large corpora of data, new opportunities for revealing huge repositories also emerge. Peg Knight will consider some of our earliest collaborations with researchers and highlight some groundbreaking data mining work on visual data sets.

The ubiquity of image- and video- based social media platforms like Instagram, Tumblr, and Vine give art history students an opportunity to engage dynamically with contemporary imagery in a live setting. Spencer Keralis will describe how engaging critically with images in social media can provide valuable insights into audience response to contemporary and historical art. This interaction offers students exposure to concepts of metadata, text mining, information literacy, data visualization, and copyright and fair use.

Liz Grumbach will discuss the challenges and rewards of supporting visual culture projects from the perspective of a Digital Humanities initiative, in particular the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) at Texas A&M University. The IDHMC supports and guides faculty projects, participates in large grant-funded projects, and has recently opened the new Humanities Visualization Space. By considering these endeavors, Liz will present project details, potentials tools, and methods for cultivating and managing visual culture projects.